I took photographs. I sketched the marks on the individual stones in my pocket notebook, carefully as I could, and hurried back to the house.
My sketches matched the drawings. Eliud’s ovoids, triangles, and squares, with their little heads and stick limbs, had to be derived from the markings in the wood. But they weren’t copies. Eliud’s figures were more formal and very differently organised, on scaffolds, in long rows, in layered chords; in tiny clusters of grace notes. Intensely excited, I saw that my insight was correct. It had to be. This was a form of musical notation.
I spread the drawings on the floor and stared at them. I took out my cello; the first time I’d touched it since I arrived here. My old playing chair was by the piano, where it had been waiting for me all these years. I pulled it out and sat for a while with the instrument between my knees, the bow in my hand. It was a kind of meditation, a reverence; a commitment to the new work (which I couldn’t begin to study yet!). I tuned my strings. I played a few scales, and then the challenging arpeggio passage from Shock and Awe: without a slip, which seemed a good omen. I looked down at the drawings. Notation, definitely, but how the hell was it supposed to be played? Eliud hadn’t left me a single clue.
Sideways, I thought; and I had another miraculous insight. In what I thought was the most significant annotation, Eliud had referred to superposition: many alternatives occupying the same auditory space. A superposition of alternate worlds, collapsed by sound… He must have made a multilayered recording! And it must be here in the schoolhouse!
I abandoned my meditation and searched the digital material, which I hadn’t yet touched: the PC’s hard drive, the memory cards, the datasticks, CDs, and discs. I checked the “computer memories” of the vintage electronic orchestra. I found nothing that was unknown to me, nothing that I could recognise as new. I was in despair. Even if the drawings could be deciphered, translated into nuanced sound, by some fantastic process I couldn’t imagine, they were scraps and sketches. It would be impossible to reconstruct the new work. Finally, my head spinning and ringing, I took the house agent’s keys and went outdoors.
I’d have looked in the studio first, just to cross it off my list: except that I didn’t want to see what I knew I’d see. The key turned easily, but the door was laced with ivy tendrils, and knee-deep in leaf litter. I had to wrestle my way in, and it was as I’d expected: mouldering relics in a cobwebbed tomb. My bed, my nest among the recording desks, was gone. So was all the equipment, of course. Soundproofing baffles hung festering from the ceiling and the walls. I backed out again, sick at heart. As I struggled to drag the door shut, I heard something fall down inside. I opened the door again and saw a dusty cardboard tube, about fifty centimetres long, lying on the floor. It was labelled Aiode. It rattled. I unwound withered tape and pulled off the cap at one end. I peered inside and saw enough to make my heart beat like thunder—
But Fenris was barking and barking.
He’d gone back to the caravan. He was on the step again: on his back legs, pawing at the door, yapping and yapping. I grabbed him, shouting. I was so keyed up, and the little dog was so infuriating. I hauled him, fighting me all the way, through the tangles, thorns ripping my arms, nettles stinging. He tried to bolt for the caravan again as soon as I slackened my grip. “Oh no you don’t!” I yelled. I twisted his collar. I shook him, I slapped him—
“What’s he done then, poor little dog?”
Mr. Raven was there, stooping by my car. “The gate was open,” he said. “I thought I’d drop by. See how you’re getting on. Sorry if it’s inconvenient.”
Like hell had the gate been open. One fist locked round Fenris’s collar, embarrassed that I’d been caught beating the little dog, I glared at him, trying to shove the hair out of my eyes.
“Getting on with what?”
“With the cleaning work,” said Mr. Raven, unperturbed. “I saw those storage boxes delivered. You’re clearing the old place out. Isn’t that what Eliud sent you for?”
“The work’s going well. Close the gate on your way out.”
I carried Fenris indoors. He was quiet now, and trembling, and I was so ashamed. I told him I was sorry. I hugged him, I kissed his rough head, I combed the burrs from his coat and shut him in the kitchen, giving him tinned tuna for a treat—
It would drive me crazy if he ran away again.
The cardboard roll was on top of the piano, where I’d left it. I eased the scroll out, gently, and unfurled it. Not only a recording, but a score. An amazing, marvellously detailed pictogram score, several metres long; and a datastick, firmly labelled Hindey Playground.
Take that, Mr. Raven. I am not some skivvy, whistled up to do the house-clearing.
Eliud trusted me. I am important.
It was very late when I went up to the barn. I found I had a text from Maria, sounding more resigned, more hopeless, very tired. I sent a reply, without mentioning the new work. I ran my own news checks on the lost flight (for form’s sake: there was no change) and headed back, still thinking, fast and furiously, about Eliud’s notation—
The moon, which had been getting brighter and brighter since I’d arrived in Norfolk, was full tonight, and the sky was clear as the dust would let it be. Impelled by an idea that wouldn’t wait for morning, I took to the prairie and climbed that barbed-wire gate again. It was dark in the trees, but the bonfire glade was full of moonlight. Eliud had copied the marks on these stones—probably the traces of an old children’s game; probably more than a hundred years old— and used them for his pictogram notation. I had photographs and sketches of the individual stones, but no image of the whole configuration; and the configuration must be crucial. I’d brought my good camera. I looked for a vantage point and found footholds in the grey squirming grooves of the chestnut stump… so convenient I had the weird idea I might have carved them myself and forgotten doing it; except that they were weathered and old. Maybe Eliud had carved them; or the children.
I climbed as high as they would take me, and the radiating star was directly below …
What all this business had meant to Eliud was important, obviously; but not to me. I didn’t have to understand Eluid’s strange ideas about the cosmos, or how those ideas meshed with his childhood memories of Hindey, (or memories of his grandfather’s stories?). All I need to know was how to play. I was still lost without him, but I thought I’d gathered all the pieces of the puzzle now. My rendition would be drastically imperfect, but I could make an attempt.
I uploaded the moonlit pictures; I printed them on photo paper and compared them minutely with some tiny pictogram annotations on the score. I prepared the vintage instruments, following Eliud’s instructions. (I’m probably the only cello soloist in the world who also knows how to tamper with antique sound channel cards.) I unrolled the first part of the score and laid it at my feet, with the radiating star images set above and below. I played along with Eliud’s recorded scaffold for the cello part, over and over, until I could match the exacting directions—not accurately, but at least note by note, term by term.
This preparation took a long time. But I felt alert, when I was finally, roughly satisfied—though hazy about when I’d last slept or eaten—and I didn’t feel like waiting. It would take months to perfect my performance, but I was ready to try the notes.
I corrected the recording levels, set the timings for the electronics, and sat down to play, the pictogram at my feet and Eliud’s machines around me.
When I set my bow to the strings I almost started to cry, because the old man wasn’t here. He wasn’t here and he would never know… It passed. Soon I was calm; engrossed. I can’t say I liked the music. Actually I didn’t like it at all at first pass; but it was compelling, and outrageously, technically challenging in a way I’d never been able to resist. The difficulties demanded a trance-like, flow-state concentration. As my body played and my mind worked; as I stopped, unrolled the score to the next passage, and returned to my chair, over and over: some part of my sleep-starved
self fell into a dream. A mighty city took shape, rising impossibly from the schoolroom floor; extending for miles, in height, in depth… I knew this vision; or so it seemed. Unless my mind was now inventing memories instead of destroying them, this city had haunted my nights since the flight vanished, or even longer: triggered by something I’d read about how Antarctica might rise, released from the immense pressure of the ice sheets. But tonight it seemed created directly by the music. At first it was a toy, a coloured game; then it filled the room, and then it was huge, unutterably vast. I left my mind and body playing and walked in its streets.
The walls were tall and black as basalt, or the black-green of very deep water. They glistened like polished ice. The streets were wide and grooved; they had decorated, raised sidewalks. I had no clue how tall I was, whether I was an ant or a giant, until I reached a wide stone ramp leading in a spiral to the doors of a huge building. The doors were the same dark red as the rocks of Mercury. The crustaceans that crept on those rocks were carved there, glinting and chittering. They were much larger than I had imagined. I watched them, feeling that I was being watched myself; but with indifference. I could do no harm.
I walked into a gallery on the outside of the huge building—a kind of conservatory, full of opulent plants. A figure moved among them. It turned and looked at me, with a knowing smirk that reminded me of Mr. Raven. The shock was staggering. It looked at me, I looked at it; and I was no longer dreaming. I was awake, and my body was turned inside out. In the schoolroom someone played the cello. In the city I, the same I, was looking at the red-grey, pulsing, twining inside of my own skull. I saw myself the way I was, in its dimensions. I was like a string twisted the wrong way in every fibre. And it was one of Eliud’s figures, actually one of them; but at home, a giant in its own world’s conditions.
It came closer, in some sense. It was curious. The sine-wave emanations engulfed me, an indescribably horrible feeling. I was inside it. No more than gut bacteria, but still I was the alien, walking in the massive, convoluted city; seeing others of my kind, and others of my race, the ovoids and the squares, but ovoid and square was nonsense now. I unrolled the score again, I played again, I heard the chiming, the chattering of children’s voices, their chorus distorting and rising. Revulsion and terror gripped me again, as once in the wood, a horrible revulsion, an otherworldly disgust that took images from slime and vomit, from suffocation and strangling, from eyes put out and a mouth full of earth—
I dropped the bow. My cello fell with a crash. I stumbled to the sound desk and stared at Christmas trees of vibration, propagating across the screens. I had dropped my bow, thrown down the instrument, but my part continued, sampled and repeated. I could see it, twining there in the mix, and I couldn’t remove myself, I couldn’t stop this. I ran out of the room and through the kitchen; Fenris’s claws came clattering after me. I swooped down and grabbed him as I fled the house.
I kept running, the little dog silent and terrified in my arms, all the way up the track. When we reached the Flint Barn I was breathless. I set Fenris down and looked back. The moon had vanished; the air felt thick and electric. From that slight elevation, under the roiling clouds that covered the sky, charcoal veined with silver, I saw hidden concavities in the prairie fields: the ghosts of old Hindey. In the hollow where St. Iaad’s church had stood, shadowy things struggled, like huge new-born animals in their birth-caul. I heard a friend’s voice muttering long ago: He might knock down a few hovels, but what kind of landowner razes a church, Aiode? The little dog pressed himself against my ankles, shivering. I could still hear Hindey Playground, unfolding its horrible music; in the distance, and inside my skull. The city was rising, in all its immensity, filling me with awful, sickening terror—
I woke up in Eliud’s bed, missing Fenris’s warm small weight at my feet. My head ached. I couldn’t even remember whether I’d finished playing the piece. Thank God Eliud wasn’t here. Whatever he meant by his new work, he’d surely be disgusted if I confessed to hippy-dippy hallucinations. In the kitchen I found an empty red wine bottle, a glass, and no sign that a meal had been eaten: which explained the throbbing head and the memory lapse! In the schoolroom there was confusion. The score was intact, but my photos were gone, and somebody had been burning treated paper in the fireplace. I set the old hardware to rights (thankfully nothing was broken. I put my cello back in its case. I ate breakfast, drank strong coffee, and resumed my task.
Deflated, hollowed out, I didn’t check the playback. I didn’t try, then or later, to resume my performance of Hindey Playground. I felt as if I’d woken from a long, exhausting dream about working with Eliud again; and now I would let somebody else decide what the new work was worth. When I was packing up the material—the drawings; the pictogram score; Eliud’s recording; the settings for the vintage electronics—I noticed that the dusty label on the score tube was in Renton’s handwriting, not Eliud’s; which seemed strange, but I didn’t let myself dwell on the puzzle. It didn’t matter. Everything went into the box labelled “Unfinished Works”—which was by no means empty.
I didn’t go back into the wood. I felt no desire to say goodbye to that dark parcel of trees. I made my nightly trek up to the Barn, but didn’t get through to Maria again. I wasn’t terribly concerned. Good news or bad, or (most likely) no news, it would wait until I’d returned to civilised connectivity. I taped the boxes. I called the removal firm’s number and left a voicemail, telling them everything was ready to pick up, and drove away.
I drove away, heading for the local market town, to leave the keys with Eliud’s house agent. It was another dull, dusty end of summer day; just like the day I’d arrived. A few miles down the road, I glanced in my rearview mirror and saw the cello case, all alone. My God! I had left Fenris behind! How the hell did that happen? Horrified, I slammed on the brakes: thank God the country road was empty behind me. I pulled over, my heart hammering. Calm down, I told myself. When did you last see him? When had I last seen Fenris? Why did that question make my hands shake—why did it sicken me? Think, think. All I could remember was talking to Eliud on the phone, that conversation when he asked me to come to Norfolk. He was whispering, his voice sounding hoarse and strange. I remembered wondering whether there was somebody with him, wondering if it was Renton of all people; and then nothing. Then I was driving to Norfolk… But when had I last seen Fenris? I couldn’t think, I just started to shake.
Thankfully I still had the keys.
I sped back to the old schoolhouse. I called him. He wasn’t in the house. I ran around searching, calling for him, getting frantic, and at last I heard him bark.
Beyond my parking place, greenery had overwhelmed the drive. I fought my way to the end, vaguely puzzled by signs that someone had burst through the tangles before me, and there was the white caravan: where it must have been standing derelict since the big fight; since Renton walked out. Fenris was barking right in front of me, but he was invisible. He must be inside. How could he be inside? I dragged at bindweed, scalded my hands on nettles and thorns, an icy sweat running down my spine. I forced the door open and saw what Fenris had been trying to show me ever since I arrived—
I fell to my knees, staring at Renton’s partly skeletal remains. I heard Eliud’s voice again: obviously his own voice this time, a grimly desperate Eliud, whispering that though he was my lover, there were parts of Mike Renton that I had never seen. I believed it now. His merman’s eyes, his tarnished-gold hair, were gone. All gone, the human flesh that had masked these strange bones, these sinuous declivities; cusps and protuberances—
“Now you see how it was,” said Mr. Raven, behind me. “Your boyfriend, he was Hindey bred from a long time back, same as the old man; same as me. Anyone could see by looking at them, if they knew the signs. But Eliud was too human to want to be Hindey bred. Mike Renton, he was just a little bit better endowed, if you take my meaning. He was a feller with a mission. Only he didn’t have the power to carry it out; and the other lad, the one that didn’
t want—he did. So Mike, he got his hooks into Eliud, called him a genius, and convinced him to write the music. For the pure strangeness of it, as Eliud believed. Then afterwards, when he figured out what Renton was really after, that’s when Eliud told you your boyfriend had to go. And you didn’t take too much persuading, did you, Aiode? You don’t remember? Righto, I suppose you wouldn’t. You’d bury a deed like that—”
So I had helped to kill Renton. I could believe it. I knew the memories were there, the hideous memories trying to crawl out of that fog in my head: what a brutal thing it was, the two of us hacking away. But there was another heap of bones, much smaller bones, and maybe Renton was a monster, maybe I hated him—but the little dog, oh, the little dog too! Poor little Fenris! How could I have done that, how could I?
“He wouldn’t stop barking.”
“Didn’t do any good, though,” Mr. Raven continued, with satisfaction. “You didn’t change a thing, and Mike Renton, he didn’t care. He’s not gone far. An’ he knew you’d be back here, when the time was right. You’d do what was needed, thinking you were following your master’s orders, you silly bitch. So you’ve opened the way. Eliud’s gone, along with a whole parcel of other lower forms, and it’s becoming their world again. Don’t you feel it?”
I didn’t turn my head. I didn’t want to find out if Mr. Raven was real or if he’d never existed. I stared at the dog’s poor little bones, and at the other remains; and Renton’s skeleton did look strange, but how could I tell what was real, how could I explain to myself, how had this happened, why had it happened, even as my lover’s mummified corpse began to stir and fatten; even if it was true that the terrible city had risen and world was ending—?
I didn’t know, I didn’t know.
Dream House
Orrin Grey
It was the last night of the festival, and we were all sitting around one of the long tables out behind The Moon and Sixpence. It was cold enough that my feet were freezing and my hands were shoved into the pockets of my jacket when not gesturing or picking up a drink. Above us, a suitably gibbous moon dipped in and out behind clouds that would otherwise have been invisible.
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